As part of the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship (PBPF), check out the Fellows’ completed handbooks!

The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship (PBPF), funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, supports students enrolled in non-specialized graduate programs to pursue digital preservation projects at public broadcasting organizations around the country. The Fellowship is designed to provide graduate students with the opportunity to gain hands-on experiences in the practices of audiovisual preservation; address the need for digitization of at-risk public media materials in underserved areas; and increase audiovisual preservation education capacity in Library and Information Science graduate programs around the country.

WGBH has developed partnerships with LIS and Archival Science graduate programs at five universities: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Missouri, University of Oklahoma, Clayton State University, and San Jose State University. Each school is paired with a local public media station to host the Fellows: WUNC, KOPN, the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, Georgia Public Broadcasting, and the Center for Asian-American Media in partnership with the Bay Area Video Coalition.

To create the handbook, Spring Fellows wrote out a draft of their process for inventorying, digitizing, and cataloging a small collection of audiovisual media; generating technical and preservation metadata; and processing the digital files for ingest into the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The draft was then developed into a fuller handbook format by the Summer Fellows, who tested the functionality and validity of the process used by the Spring Fellows and modified the handbook accordingly.

The handbook is thus the combined work of the Spring and Summer Fellows. Each handbook details the Fellows’ operational process in a step-by-step manner, includes images of what their procedure looked like, and provides useful tips on what does and does not work on their particular computer and station configurations. Through this vetting process, the handbook has been developed into a tool that can be used by future students when they undertake digitization projects on the equipment, and can be used as sample documentation for other schools thinking about setting up AV digitization training stations.